The story of the African penguins is exciting but also somewhat disturbing. Currently we can find these birds in the southern tip of Africa and other parts of the world such as the Antarctic continent, the south coast of Australia or the west coast of South America. Sticking to Africa, they feel comfortable on the west coast of South Africa and Namibia due to their environmental characteristics, but the penguin population living in this part of the planet significantly lower more than it was thousands of years ago.

The last glacial maximum occurred about 20,000 years ago. This period defines the time when ice sheets reached their maximum size during the most recent glaciation in Earth’s geological history, commonly known as the Ice Age or Würm glaciation. This period has been widely studied by scientists and remains a very interesting phase because it can help us understand how climate evolves and what effect it has on the creatures that are best adapted to it.

In fact, one of the most valuable tools human beings have for predicting the climatic and geological evolution of our planet is knowledge. how was it in the past. And also how it evolved to reach its current state. A group of researchers from the Department of Botany and Zoology and the School of Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa is dedicated to this. These scientists believe that during the last glacial maximum, hundreds of millions of seabirds and penguins lived off the west coast of South Africa. The landscape today is radically different.

If you can’t adapt, the best thing you can do to survive is to migrate.

Twenty thousand years ago, human activity had no effect on Earth’s climate. Current climate models cannot ignore the human footprint on our planet’s climate, but they also include naturally occurring interactions between the atmosphere, landforms, oceans, and large ice floes. 20,000 years is a long time in human terms, but if we look at this time in the context of the geological history of the Earth, it is a breath. One that has happened a lot to African penguins.

A few lines, the scientist who led the researchers at the university I mentioned above, Dr. In his research, Heath Beckett argues that in 1910, South Africa’s Dassen island in the Atlantic Ocean had a population of 1000 people. 1.45 million penguins. A century later, in 2011, there were no more than 21,000 pairs of these birds in all of South Africa. And in 2019 that last figure has been reduced to just 13,600 pairs. The trend is worrying. So much so that the study, published by these researchers in the African Journal of Marine Science, states that currently 97% of the penguin population in South Africa consists of just seven colonies.

These birds are important. All the animals we share the planet with matter. Climate changes as a result of the natural evolution of the climate after the last glacial period forced millions of penguin colonies to migrate further south. to the Antarctic continent. But human activities are largely responsible for the unbearable pressure they have had to deal with in the last century. And especially in the last decades. This is the thesis that Beckett and his collaborators advocate in their work with one purpose: to emphasize human responsibility in preventing extinctions to which some species are doomed.

Cover photo: Pixabay

More information: African Journal of Marine Sciences

In magnet: You won’t see anything as frightening as these two penguins fighting for a female today.